Surveillance cameras may help fight crime in Kansas City areas

? If the startup money can be raised, police in Kansas City and Kansas City, Kan., plan to test the use of surveillance cameras in high-crime areas.

The one-year pilot program is designed to test whether the cameras help reduce crime and can function in the area’s changing weather conditions.

The two police departments released maps Monday of where the cameras will be located, if the Kansas City Metropolitan Crime Commission can raise an estimated $250,000 to fund the program. The commission will seek private funds, although Kansas City, Kan., has contributed $50,000. Kansas City, Mo., has not budgeted any money for the pilot project.

The cameras are used throughout the country, including in Chicago, where the mayor recently asked for $1 million to add 100 more.

On the Missouri side, eight cameras will be concentrated on an area in the eastern part of the city that recorded two homicides in the first three months of this year, as well as 15 robberies, 50 assaults, 28 burglaries and 18 stolen vehicles.

Kansas City, Kan., will spread its nine cameras among seven locations, all within a 6.5-square-mile area near downtown.

Police said the area recorded 8 percent of the city’s homicides in the past three years and 17 percent of the city’s robberies, even though only 7 percent of the city’s population lives there.

Joyce Riley, who lives in the Kansas City, Mo., area where the cameras will be used, said residents have some concerns about privacy but are hopeful the cameras will bring them some peace and quiet.

“We’re thinking it’s one of the best things since apple pie,” she said Monday. “We’re hoping it will work for the reasons they say it will.”

Police said they will use computer software to “black out” windows and doors from images of the neighborhoods.

The cameras won’t be monitored at all times but will record images 24 hours a day. Police can check the recorded images, which will be stored for about 30 days, if a crime is reported.

In Chicago, where crime detection specialists monitor 80 cameras, city officials said the cameras have led to dozens of arrests since 2005, mostly for drug transactions.

Kevin Smith, spokesman for Chicago’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications, said residents became “very comfortable” with the cameras once they saw the results.

“Drug dealing and gangbanging were no longer happening on their street corners,” Smith said. “One resident summed it up best when he said he was able to sit on his porch now, something he previously hadn’t been able to do.”

Police in both cities will invite residents to watch the images at police buildings during the pilot program.

Eventually, police would like to post the images on the Internet so residents who have been screened and trained could conduct neighborhood watches from their computers.